Here's how it works: An artist, filmmaker, musician, designer, curator, etc. creates a project (no charities or causes) with a target dollar amount and a deadline. Donors are offered rewards as incentives, such as thank you notes or a copy of an album or DVD. The average pledge is $70 and the most popular is $25. If the monetary goal is not reached by the deadline, donors are not charged. If the project is successful (fully funded), Kickstarter takes 5%, Amazon applies a 3 - 5% credit card processing fee, and the project creator gets the rest.

Kickstarter Stats

As Kickstarter puts it on its website, the premise is "all-or-nothing funding." And, according to a post on Deceptive Cadence, NPR's classical music blog, "more than 50 percent of Kickstarter projects fail to attract enough funding." I checked in with Justin Kazmark with Kickstarter who put it this way in an email: "The success rate for projects overall is 44%." He added that "the interesting stat is that the majority of dollars pledged (about 88%) go to successfully funded projects, not the ones that fail to reach their goal."

Kickstarter provides a stats page with daily updates. It includes information ranging from the amount that's been pledged to Kickstarter projects (more than $250 million to date) and projects that have never received a single pledge (more than 7,000).